Inspiration and Context

What are the precedent projects? Describe what informed your ideas and your outcome? How does your outcome relate to other work in the field? 

UPS and FedEx send users a notification email confirming the status of the package. It also scans the mail and sends the image to the user as confirmation on the day of delivery. 

Mr. Postman is an IoT application that uses solar power, an automatic locking system, a WiFi-equipped Rasberry Pi brain, and an accompanying app to let you know when a mail has arrived,  when a mail has been collected and allows security features to safely unlock the mailbox. It is still enabled by email and in-app notifications.

It was critical to our solution that we create an experience that would nudge the user rather than be obtrusive with notifications on the phone. We created and delivered this experience using an object in the house that the user frequents - and integrated that with computing. Our hypothesis was that the user doesn't need to check mail as soon as it arrived, but be in a position to be reminded that there was mail to be collected. 

This experience through an ambient object is the difference between earlier projects and our solution.